Saturday, 3 March 2012

Hot foot from Dundee

Work commitments are such that my visit to the Scottish
Labour Party Conference has been restricted to a single day.

Even then, I arrived in the City of Discovery with little
expectation that I would discover anything new. In that I was not disappointed.

I wrote back at the special Conference in the Autumn about
the extent to which the Party had failed to come to terms with the scale of, or
the reasons for our defeat last May and five months later little has changed.

Indeed, with Local Government elections looming and the fear that the annihilation
of our MSPs might be in danger of being followed by the annihilastion of our
councillors a year later, there were some at least who clearly felt the best
tactic was to put on a brave face and hope for the best. Time will tell whether
that will work. Anything’s possible, I suppose.

The Party is crying out for leadership. For somebody,
anybody, in authority, simply to say “This is what needs to be done and what
therefor will be done”. Even if there were then reservations about the course
chosen, many would be inclined to follow if only to be travelling in some
direction at all.

Instead, we are offered “This is where we should go if
that’s alright with you”; or “This is where we might go”; or even “Where do you
think we ought to go?”

And even “bold” initiatives turn out, on the briefest of
examination, to be no initiatives of any significance at all. So the calibre of
our Candidates is to be improved but the current MSP group are immediately and automatically deemed to be more than good enough to continue. Without exception. Is
there a single person in Scotland who believes that? More powers are (maybe) to
be offered to the Scottish Parliament, but any detail at all is left lacking.
We are maybe to talk to people who are outwith the Labour Party about our
policy platform but only to people who already support the existing platform.
And, in an act of almost obvious vindictiveness, if we must talk about the
powers of the Scottish Parliament (sigh) then let’s consider whether powers should
be taken away from the Scottish
Parliament and given to local authorities. In the absence of any popular demand
for this at all, it is difficult to conclude that it is being said for any reason
other than to keep the Parliament in its place.

And even that presumes there is a coherent line. As I set
off to Conference I had simply no idea as to what Johann might say. There had
certainly been major speeches the day before from Ed, Douglas Alexander, Anas
Sarwar and Jim Murphy but there had been no co-ordination between them; no
sense that they were preparing the way for what might come today. Instead of
being offered the dramatic progression to a finale which comes in a proper
opera, we were treated to no more than a series of concert arias. And even then
not always in the same language.

But today made things no clearer.

It wasn’t a bad speech and it had a few good lines but it
appeared to have no real function other than getting from its start to its finish. When I
critiqued Salmond’s October conference speech I referred to the Party Leader’s
Speech playbook. Paul Sinclair has clearly read the same manual.

But whereas Salmond lead up to the big policy announcement
and then bottled it, Johann tried to pretend a big policy announcement had been
made when it patently hadn’t.

A Commission? Really? Another one? Scotland, even as I
write, will no doubt be clearing their collective diaries in anticipation of
its recommendations. Not.

Much more honest to just have said that the Scottish
Leadership simply does not really regard these matters as very important.
Indeed in the better parts of the speech when Johann gave practical examples of
redistributive policies that could be pursued under existing powers but weren’t
being pursued by the current administration you could (just) see how such a
line might be sustained.

There is nothing more insincere than an insincere apology.
Johann started by saying we had to stop apologising but, to be honest, we
haven’t started. And that’s because too many at the top while realising
the political reality of the need to be seen to
apologise, don’t actually believe we have anything to apologise for at all. In their
heart of hearts they think that those in need of apologising are the SNP for
their effrontery in defeating us and the Scottish people for their ingratitude
in rejecting us.

Soon, on this view of the world, Salmond will be exposed as
the “conman” he is and the electorate left embarrassedly having to admit to
having been comprehensively taken in by him. And things will return to their
proper order.

Here’s hoping that’s right because there is little sign of
things changing at Labour’s own initiative.

3 comments:

Look on the bright side. Nobody seems to have run with a picture of a half-empty hall yet.

And the great big intellectual vacuum in Scottish politics has meant that you're famous for your TV appearances. In a "Big in Japan" sort of way anyway. And I don't mean that unkindly, it's just that the Sunday Politics is only at the top of the ratings among the political anorak demographic.

And if it should all turn out badly then you'll be able to write a book about it with a much better chance of being published than most.